University of Toronto Department of Political Science

Spotlight: Antoinette Handley

Antoinette Handley Focuses on the Role of Business in Shaping and Influencing Politics

By Hailey Eisen

Professor Antoinette Handley was born in South Africa and came of age on a university campus in the province of KwaZulu-Natal during the 1980s, when the region was experiencing intense political conflict. “I was at the epicenter of a small-scale civil war between a group aligned with the government and supporters of the African National Congress (ANC),” she says from her office at the University of Toronto. “It became very clear to me, as a young person, how enormously high the stakes were in politics and how consequential politics could be in transforming and remaking people’s lives.”

During her undergraduate study, Handley studied a combination of English, law and political science with the intention of becoming a lawyer. This path began to shift as she became highly involved in campus politics and was elected president of the student body. She went on to Oxford University, on a Rhodes scholarship, to complete her Master of Philosophy degree in Intentional Relations.

“My first real job was working in Johannesburg at the South African Institute of International Affairs — the premier foreign policy think tank in the country,” she says. “It was an incredibly exciting time following South Africa’s transition to democracy, and all kinds of new policy decisions were being laid-down for the country as we began to develop political relationships around the world.”

After three years Handley decided to pursue a PhD in politics, and so she traveled to the United States to study at Princeton. But this wasn’t her first experience living in the U.S. “At the end of high school I participated in a Rotary exchange and they sent me to Mississippi,” she says with a laugh. “Perhaps they thought I’d feel at home there.” The experience proved to be eye-opening for the 18-year-old Handley, who had come from a sheltered middle-class life in a small farming community. “I had this romantic delusion that the U.S. post-civil rights movement was a multi-racial wonderland, but within two weeks of my being there the black students at my school went on boycott in a dispute over the appointment of a supervisor,” she recalls. “I realized the extent to which racialized politics can still exist in societies long after it looks as though a formal political resolution has taken place.”

In 2003, Handley came to the University of Toronto as an Assistant Professor. “I loved the city and loved the department, and felt very much at-home here,” she says. Handley has taught a number of third and fourth year courses with a focus on Africa. When asked what she likes most about teaching, she replies: “Students teach you different ways to think about the world, they bring fresh eyes to materials you may have read 100 times before.” For her, the best part is the way in which U of T students really become engaged in what’s going on in the world.  “They are very often motivated to go out there and change the world and make it better, “she says. “That’s a huge source of energy and inspiration for me.”

In terms of research, Handley has focused primarily on Africa, traveling throughout the continent on a regular basis. Her first book, which developed out of her dissertation, was entitled Business and the State in Africa: Economic Policy-Making in the Neo-liberal Era and was published in 2008. She spent her first number of years at U of T conducting research and fieldwork pertaining to the following questions: why and how is business able to shape economic policy-making in some countries in Africa and not in others, and why and how do certain capitalist classes emerge in some countries and not others? Her work took her to South Africa, Mauritius, Ghana and Zambia. In the first two countries she found the emergence of an autonomous business-class, capable of engaging in contentious political debate with government and producing better policy as a result. In the latter countries she found business communities that were highly dependent upon government and thus, when policy questions arose, they would either go along with the state or pursue their own individual best-interests without any focus on an economy-wide vision of what business needed.

“For the past 25 years in Africa we’ve had the dominance of neo-liberal policies and have stressed the importance of the free market and businesses’ role as representative of the free market in driving the economy,” she says. “Yet, if you look at the work being done here, we knew (and still know) very little about what business looks like and the capacity, if any, it has to drive the process of economic development.” Thus, the importance of this book is to take business seriously and to understand how it differs in impact among African countries.

Continuing with her focus on the interaction between business and the state, Handley has begun a second major research project which she plans to eventually publish as a book. The focus this time is how business and the state have responded to the HIV/AIDS epidemic in South Africa, Botswana, Kenya and Uganda. “My approach is to not think of HIV/AIDS as a health issue or social tragedy (although it is both) but rather to examine it as a shock to the economic system,” she says. Using this epidemic as her focus, she is examining how power and politics work in various societies and how various business communities are impacting and being impacted by HIV/AIDS. “An ongoing question in my work is: when and how can we harness the self-interested nature of economic actors and how do they act in the broader social interest?”

Through her work she hopes to shake up some of the stereotypes typically associated with Africa. “When people think of Africa they often think of wild animals, safari, political collapse and peasant farmers,” she says. “But, I hope to recapture the sense that Africa is not a place of pathology and breakdown but one of resourcefulness, entrepreneurialism, and people making a living under difficult circumstances.”